Upsetting Day: Blah Girls

Remember the South Park-inspired classic, Blah Girls?

You know, Blah Girls. Or BlahBlahBlah, they were flakey on the title.

You don’t? It’s a Hollywood takedown from Ashton Kutcher, the mind behind several blue Wikipedia titles and red Tomatometer scores. Out of all aughts icons, he was the most Kutcher. His absence from BET’s Punk’d remake robbed us of an article. But we still have Blah Girls, and its iconic Halloween blahisode.

Come on. Think hard. It’s Blah Girls! An early web cartoon, aged like fine milk. While other South Park clones are deformed shrines to sloth, this had Todd Goldman, the mind behind nothing. The decade’s hardest-working thief, including Madoff. North Park was Todd’s overdue Hollywood breakout after a long career tracing boardwalk t-shirts and SomethingAwful threads. You might know his signature painting, Big Lisa:

Or some of his deeper cuts.

Blah Girls experiments by tapping Todd’s original thoughts. While the North Park aesthetic is familiar, the girl-hate’s fresh. We follow three loving caricatures of celebrity fandom. You’ll know them when you see them.

Remember Krystle?

And Britney?

And our favorite, oh what the fuck—

Neither do I. Tiffany’s a fresh face in the Jemimah genre. Yet I suspect many of us saw Blah Girls and simply buried it. Deaths and injuries are healthier memories. The hits have half a million views, and came out a decade before total digital slavery. There are over ninety shorts. The mascots have guest spots on award shows. We’re a post Blah Girls culture, and we’ve manually drilled that fact from our minds.

Like the Oprah/Selleck sex tape.

Just a cutaway gag. I thought I’d ignored some gossip, but they just share a birthday. You can see how this was written.

Eventually, the study of public, needless failure reaches Kutcher. The best among you either forgot him or never wasted that RAM at all. Awesome. Skip this paragraph, and think of Blah Girls as an isolated disgrace. For the rest of us, between playing newspaper assassin and rape apologist, Kutcher found his perfect role: patsy. Or as they say in his tax bracket, entrepreneur.

Between Punk’d and Killers, Kutcher gave comedy a try. While his work in adrenochrome panic proved more influential, someone watched enough Blah Girls to sustain endless shorts. And it’s not just a rubber stamp: Kutcher at least mimed enthusiasm. He gave the press tour nearly half the passion of a Masterson defense:

All technically accurate–Blah Girls, or Blah Blah Blah, or I Am Earth’s Most Overeducated Flash Cartoon Critic, is a Hollywood satire. Those are a lot like street racing. For every winner, there are five corpse-filled wrecks. And Blah Girls episodes book. The title delivers on laziness and contempt before the first mouth flaps.

The interactive part? Hard to tell. I think it’s two videos where Kutcher asked/begged the public for jokes.

If so, Blah Girls was interactive like working the grill at Chili’s, or taking out your own appendix. A rare offer, since most grifters don’t have darksteel balls.

Let’s try it.

Your votes will take a bit to collect and disqualify. While I decide which citizens count, let’s sample an episode.

Crowdsourcing’s the most forgivable gimmick. I’d rather hear socialized starfucking than stale starfucking. Sadly, they don’t overdo it. Most Blah Girls shorts are original trash, raging at nothing.

Take Save Amy Winehouse!.

We’re doing this. I have my orders: slogan two says “cursed artifacts.” If it helps, I hand out enough insults that this feels like the Ghost of Christmas Future telling me to reel it in. I’ll consider it.

After a short Vitamin Water plug–more on that later–the Blah Girls formula kicks off. The sketch is two minutes long, and drags. It took longer to screencap and insult than a movie. That’s Ghost of Christmas Future-level procrastination. Who waits eighty years to give a robber baron their first warning? A hundred Tiny Tims have phossy jaw because he took the scenic route. Scrooge has five good years left to balance that karma. Two if Jawless Tim comes for revenge.

The theme sets an upbeat mood: “Blah,” is the only lyric, and each soulless power chord evokes a life wasted. Chances missed, loves lost, friends forgotten. What’s left? Run down the hourglass with the Blah Girls.

Each intro ends with “Oh my god, shut up.” Decent review of the show, but intended to reflect vacuity. Odd, when every human niche has filler phrases. I feel that it’s, like, common to pace that there human dialogue out bro. Feel me, darkling? >implying you don’t. It takes ten podcast episodes to cut back on those, and then you sound like an android. A cheap one–pricey units use filler words.

Krystle says it, since she's the default Blah Girl. The others fill the nerd and moron slots. I’ll let you guess which is which.

Tragically standard. Efficient, even. One day you’ll see this triad in holograms, or painted on wasteland walls. Still, the girls direly need a Kenny. You’re already stealing Matt Stone’s car, why leave a wheel behind?

Welcome to Blah High. It has another name, but no it doesn’t. The Powerpuffs pull today’s celebrity out of a hat:

Singing punchlines should be treated like torturing small animals. Maybe it’s a generational quirk, but so are cross bonfires and autoplagiarism. Our sins don’t deserve special treatment.

Cue cutaway gag one. We’re not just robbing South Park today. The Blah Girls is the best self-esteem boost Seth McFarlane could ask for. Take his voice work out, and you’re left with spiritual cyanide.

Forget tone, the tragedy so far, or the tragedy lurking ahead. Our final joke–spoilers–is Amy Winehouse dying violently. Again. Why undermine it in the cutaway gag? You’re already getting scooped by reality. There’s a minute left on the clock, and the sketch has nowhere to go but its own colon.

The girls talk, and it's pointless. Less because of the overall contempt for youth and X chromosomes, and more because, minor variations aside, all three girls are Kyle. Making every exchange Kyle talking to Kyle about People headlines, agreeing with himself, and jumping to a cutaway. That sucks. The first hints of sleep start taking me when STEWART TIME.

Stewart’s the show within the show, until Ashton gets bored and makes him the show. He’s kind of like Perez Hilton, except Perez Hilton. Including an unfortunate impression. Stewart’s The Soup knockoff is a better time, like losing a finger instead of an eye. Think Scrappy-Doo, but Scooby tears out your eye.

To be clear: Stewart’s Hot Minute! fucking sucks, and his call adds nothing. The Blah Girls is just the end of thought. It’s not hard to watch so much as hard to believe.

Inspired, the girls found a school club to save the episode premise/Amy Winehouse. You could call it a parody of student activism. You can say anything. I’m the next U.N. general secretary. Rococo is a subgenre of ska. Car batteries are full of milk, drink up to grow big and strong.

The NYPD needs time to cross coasts, so the girls make some progress. Until the administration threatens them with detention, which is full of more celebrities. Along with an already-ancient Buffalo Bill joke. Lotion, skin, etc.

The girls stand by their values. The contemptible ones Todd projects, not the actions they’ve taken so far.

Then Amy explodes.

I hear my nemesis, the strawman. “She was spinning out. Aren’t The Blah Girls just keeping it real?” In a seminar for freshman alcoholics, I’d nod and thank you for participating. In a workshop for graduate cokeheads, I’d shield you from your peers. But here, in the glorious comfort of text, I can live honestly: seek help. Making voodoo dolls of popstars is just stalking without the charm. The closer you are to Bill Maher, the further you are from the light.

That’s the episode, sans the parts where I blacked out sober. There’s a setup line for Amy Winehouse exploding, but good luck retaining it. Blah Girls runs into a classic trap of Hollywood parodies: you need to be fluent in celebrity garbage to get it, and addicted to enjoy. Which, if you’re sane, chafes with the ire dripping from every frame.

Honor demands that I note the best joke. I don’t think it’s my sanity suffocating, though I wouldn’t know. Blah Girls has an intentionally funny runner. Semi-lifted from 30 Rock, but so’s half my brain. I’m a silver linings type, as my normal letters to Tina Fey explain.

See, Vitamin Water sponsored this unsinkable ship. Instead of stock ad reads or background gags, Blah Girls sticks ten-second skits before one-minute episodes. They work better than they should. In fact, they’re invariably better than the celebrity chatter that follows.

Vitamin Water as spinach, paper-mache teen as Popeye. It’s a simple, human joke that leaves quickly. It works, in the most basic sense, and today that’s a miracle.

Then it’s back to injecting bile. Honestly, I’m glad there’s a winner in all this. Half the profit of Blah Girls went to tormenting Ja Rule.

We could leave here. I could walk away, with this fleck of gold bronze dust in the sewage. But that’s not what slogan two asks for. Each Blah Girls skit is one percent of a cursed thought. I need to melt them into one artifact.

I will now review fifty episodes of Blah Girls. Goodbye. Human souls have limits, and the darkness will take me. This is my Morannan. And that’s my last Google-dependent joke. Burn my body, so that I don’t rise as something wrong.

A promo spot for the Blah Girls at TechCrunch. Krystle introduces herself, Britney for the easy spears joke, and finally “Tiffany, my token black friend.”

Strong start. I’ll be generous with the score.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Good point, Blah Girls: let’s segregate adoption. Two videos in, the theme song already gives me heart contractions.

0 out of 3 Blahs

“Do you remember when Gwen Stefani thought braces and Kool-Aid were fashion forward?” I like deep cuts, and still can’t imagine who this line’s for. But we should get them out of Gwen Stefani’s bushes. The girls then debate the merits of England, as if they weren’t avatars of American shame. The Harry Potter joke kills my dreams for the future.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Early shorts lean on violence–The Blah Girls finds confidence in its wit and cinematography later.

Pink Blah jumps in front of an ambulance to meet a celebrity in the hospital. I’d give it nothing, but there’s a Vitamin Water spot beforehand.

2 out of 3 Blahs

This episode takes on environmentalists, who we hate because of Matthew McConaughey. I guess. I like air, but I’m bougie like that.

It would’ve chafed with his once-extant dignity, but Kutcher should have pitched this shit to conservative networks. He’d have gone from the bottom of the barrel to industry leader in one Blah sketch. Paradise Lost knocks reigning in hell, but I say play the game you’re in.

0 out of 3 Blahs

The episode? Pain. But in the plug, Vitamin Water brings back the dead.

2 out of 3 Blahs

When bulimia’s your villain, you’re playing on easy mode. You have to fuck up so bad to come off wrong. The Blah Girls fuck it up, and there’s no Vitamin Water to save them.

-1 out of 3 Blahs

You might expect limp both-sides rambling to be the low point. But it’s actually them fucking up the Vitamin Water joke. It shouldn’t matter to me, but I had nothing, and now I have less. This is my end.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Define life. Am I really alive? Is it life when I watch Tiffany mock John Mayer’s head? Or am I closer to a rock? I think I liked a line in here, but I may just be dying.

1 out of 3 Blahs

I’ll give Default Blah this: she fast-talks like the child of Twista and also-Twista, and curses like she’s on real South Park. Shame everything she’s given sucks. Today, a pedophile catfishes the gang.

-2 out of 3 Blahs

They argue over who watches what TV with who and…I can hear the ghost of comedy. It’s faint, but it’s there. There’s a version of this that wouldn’t shorten my lifespan. That gets a point.

1 out of 3 Blahs

It still sucks.

0 out of 3 Blahs

This one’s built around Shia LeBouf jokes, three career twists ago. It’s a trip, and also sucks bad.

0 out of 3 Blahs

See the title. The Blah Girls decide to make a sex tape. I don’t know why, or care. They’re dissuaded from this deviance by “Mr. Polansky,” who ends the sketch with his suicide. Interesting idea.

-1 out of 3 Blahs

For once, a topic that Kutcher might know and feel something about. The jokes aren’t better, but they’re jokes. It still binges sewage, but in a more focused, ambitious way.

2 out of 3 Blahs

After a minute of impotence-inducing garbage, there’s a good botox joke. I almost went into shock. I’d forgotten joy.

2 out of 3 Blahs

They left “Blah” out of the video title. I’ve fixed the title case flubs so far, but fuck that. If they don’t care, neither do I. As for this round, I can feel the Blah Girls’ effort era ending. But I’ll enjoy the memories. And the line “At least she died in Chanel.”

1 out of 3 Blahs

The girls dress up as soft celebrity targets. A running Wonder Twins joke tells me this team cannot write this show. They have spandex dreams. They’re scrambling through Wikipedia’s fashion pages, looping one Kardashian ass joke every two episodes.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Let’s play joke doctor. Consider this line:

Her dad’s richer than Ryan Seacrest.

Obviously, my SNL packets were too awesome for TV. But beyond the non-sequitur, this lacks specificity. Yes, Seacrest outearns mortals. So does every other name in this series. The celebrity should be rich by Oscars standards. Hell, 50 Cent paid for this hell ritual, show him some love.

1 out of 3 Blahs

Kutcher thinks of the children. It goes as well as you’re thinking. For all the aimless venom, there’s a mid-tier Vitamin Water gag. I’m feeling thirsty! What’s your favorite flavor? I like blue.

1 out of 3 Blahs

The show is doomed. They’ve realized Stewart bits cost less and suck the same amount. The Stewarting has begun.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Everyone dies again. I’d join them, but now dying is hack. The game “Hot or Homeless” ages less like white wine and more like white mold.

-1 out of 3 Blahs

I was wrong earlier. Stewart’s shit isn’t better, your brain just blanks. It’s a very zen strain of garbage. The indica strain of The Blah Girls.

0 out of 3 Blahs

A quick joke about a pregnancy, and a grim reminder of our current algorithm enslavement. This would be ten minutes long today.

1 out of 3 Blahs

Vitamin Water can distort time itself! Followed by every vampire joke you expect. Marilyn Manson’s appearance comes with whiplash. Amy Winehouse’s appearance comes with pain.

Extra demerit for this one: Twilight is a feather-soft target, but they still focus on unrelated celebrities. Laziness isn’t the word. That’s harder. They chose a harder way to fail.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Krystle eats and becomes fat.

-2 out of 3 Blahs

PETA’s a willing heel, and the girls lose the argument. Hard. I’ll explain in Blah terms: It’s like watching 2002 Eminem battle 2024 Eminem. Though if you want dead pandas, this is your episode.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Stewart’s washed.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Vitamin Water arms your white blood cells with assault rifles. Praise the Great Hustler, he who got rich or died trying. May we all find our crystal skulls.

Better yet, there’s a flash of life where the girls commit crimes without celebrity dialogue. It’s there and then gone, like a summer love. I miss her, but at least I have a comprehensive recap of The Blah Girls.

2 out of 3 Blahs

I’ve got a new respect for pre/post Community Joel McHale. The soup sucked riotously, and it was never this. I’d rather give Ticketmaster my genetic code than hear more Stewart. On to more Stewart.

-1 out of 3 Blahs

“Designer clothing’s expensive. Have anything for that?”

They’ve made me a hypocrite: “Oh my god” is my new kill trigger. Krystle aims for a brown note and nails it. Marvelously. This show was not meant to be binge watched, or watched, or made. Fucking help me.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Think about the effort behind this. Touring conventions. Smirking through interviews. Enslaving animators. And you leave typos in the titles for fifteen years. They may have wanted to have a tv series. But they really didn’t want to make one. It’s the same shit.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Here’s where my nerd youth fails me. A joke about “Spencer and Heidi” might be great. It has structure, and texture. But I don’t know them, and the search would smother my soul’s last flickers. I’m giving it the score bump and marching forward.

2 out of 3 Blahs

Crystal wants to be Kim Kardashian. She’s punished with her period. Then a SWAT team attacks her now-cursed school, followed by a cameo that’s either Keifer Sutherland or reverse racism on my part. Sorry about that.

-1 out of 3 Blahs

Right, interactive. Despite the desperate title, Ashton enjoys the writer’s room. You can have fun steering toward the iceberg. The passengers screaming below look like confused ants.

I’d love to explore blahgirls.com’s ruins, but the Internet Archive is fighting for its life, and the current site’s a gambling ad. So while I came to write about 2008, we found a perfect picture of 2024.

1 out of 3 Blahs

Blahgirls.com, like most dreams, remains unreachable. But you could upload a video of your joke! A vault of jokes that didn’t make it on BlahGirls, tantalizingly out of reach. As a garbage archaeologist, this may be my white whale.

2 out of 3 Blahs

It’s the same shit.

-1 out of 3 Blahs

It’s the same shit, uploaded out of order. It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t care. Maybe Stewart's dancepop theme’s just melting my hope. But that sloth insults everything that never gets made. The work that wilts in drawers while 2 Joker 2 Frown goes wood.

The Lohan shot in this one tastes like ash. A life buried under a hundred Stewarts. The more Stewart I hear, the darker the echo.

God, the animation sucks ass.

-3 out of 3 Blahs

After two minutes of hateful star-vomit, Stewart reviews Paul Blart: Mall Cop. As in The Blah Girls reviews Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Blah Girls has opinions on other comedy. This should be impossible. This is a media eclipse. If you stare directly at it, you go blind.

Never mind, I’m wrong. I have to keep my eyes. And ears. My cursed, pitch-preserving ears.

-3 out of 3 Blahs

We’re not trying, but we’re thinking. Tiffany gets an in-universe vlog, exploring a new medium of suck. A far cheaper one. Between this trashcan and Stewart’s one-minute hate, the animation’s somewhere between Foamy the Squirrel and a tin can.

Still, it’s an idea, and more focused. Focus doesn’t help. Kutcher’s minions don’t have two thoughts on one topic. Blah vlogs are dead on arrival, so expect to see more of them.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Fair enough. On the plus side, eventually I’ll be dead.

Britney hates her flesh, or at least wants to improve it. I know that one. Like all intense feelings, there’s comedy there. Here’s what Britney’s got:

Of course, they didn’t know where things were going. But I can’t help but wish Winehouse was alive and Kutcher let’s move along.

-2 out of 3 Blahs

Forty-two episodes in, they find her character. She’s Cartman.

2 out of 3 Blahs

Oh shit, multiple characters! Multiple backgrounds! Occasional animation! We’re back, and it’s the fucking worst! How about more vlogs? Maybe the catfish predator? I’ll take that stream of consciousness over three chipmunks pulling random names from Seventeen.

No, that’s the wrong joke. No one writing this reads Seventeen. They haven’t talked to a teenage girl since detention. Well, maybe Todd. He might have ripped that off Shmorky too.

-2 out of 3 Blahs

I can’t, I fucking can’t. I fucking…

The Phelps joke is okay, and they remake the Bale rant. We’re back to par.

0 out of 3 Blahs

More Blah classic. They swear off boys, and then stumble into “Take Your Celebrity to the Mall Day.” It’s a minute long, and every second stretches over the horizon. I have lived full lives in this minute. I have built worlds. I have started drinking again.

One of the better episodes. Zero points.

0 out of 3 Blahs

That wasn’t my typo in 42. They’re not certain how Krystle is spelled. I want to believe it’s a gag, but it’s not consistently wrong either.

Krystle quits texting. You could write the rest. If you’ve read this many words of a comedy article on Tuesday morning, you can blow this sketch out of the water. It has one good idea, and ditches it for a Joaquin Phoenix joke immediately.

A fresh flavor of failure. I’m down to bring new stock jokes into this relationship. One point.

1 out of 3 Blahs

It’s Fashion Week, and Stewart’s announcing! The coup is complete. It has always been Stewart. It will never not be Stewart again.

It’s short, and Krystle/Kristal/Crystal/Creestol makes a decent joke about “smiling with your eyes.” To honor our new king, two points.

1 out of 3 Blahs

Krystle bends the knee. She absorbs fifty seconds of insults from Stewart. Twenty years in Blahtime. She is dumb. She is fat. She climbed the mountain and became Cartman, only to fall and become nothing.

I watch in silence. Dark times have fallen.

0 out of 3 Blahs

Krystle, brought low, seeks a warrior’s death. I had that pride once. Forty-nine episodes ago.

No one dies. We are all sentenced to life. Vitamin Water is a memory.

1 out of 3 Blahs

Man, this show kind of sucks.

0 out of 3 Blahs

A single lesson shines through Blah Girls. I’ll tell you when I find it. Catch you next week.

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